Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Labour's plan to give 16-year-olds the vote is cynical gerrymandering

If you want to know just how bereft of ideas and vision the Labour Party has become, look no further than its plan to give 16-year-olds the vote. This is naked generational gerrymandering, a desperate stab to improve Labour's electoral fortunes by meddling with the voting age rather than by giving actual, already existing adult voters something worth voting for. Incapable of inspiring the British electorate to go to the ballot box and put an enthusiastic cross next to the word Labour, Labour's bigwigs hope that magicking up a new electorate, a new swathe of largely immature, Left-feeling voters, will boost its ability to win and secure power.

The shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan will say today that lowering the voting age to 16 will be one of Labour's "top priorities" if it wins the 2015 General Election. It will apparently be "among Ed Miliband's first acts". Why the urgency? Why the prioritisation of something that no one, least of all 16-year-olds, is demanding? Because this is an extraordinarily self-serving measure on Labour's part, which might get dolled up in the language of "extending the franchise" and "spreading democracy" but is really motored by the pretty desperate needs of an increasingly cut-off party that has seen its traditional vote and membership numbers plummet. Having lost huge numbers of adult subscribers to its cause (whatever that might be these days), Labour hopes to co-opt easier-to-convince, less critically minded, Labour-inclined yoof instead.

This is about bypassing the crisis of voter turnout and the question of why fewer and fewer adults engage in elections and party politics. The chasm that has opened up between politicians and the people, which is most clearly expressed in the fact that loads of us no longer vote, is a serious issue, requiring deep thought and analysis. It demands soul-searching on the part of our parties, who might just find that turnout has declined in direct proportion to their own jettisoning of big, future-oriented ideas about how society should be organised in favour of squabbling like accountants over a few million quid on the welfare bill or what is the best way to stop people from eating junk food. Solving the crisis of democratic engagement requires coming up with some moving, inspiring, dramatic ideas that might be worth engaging with; lacking both the intellectual resources and cojones to do such a thing, Labour prefers instead to gerrymander the age groups.

Hilariously, some people try to present the enfranchisement of 16-year-olds as the unfinished business of universal suffrage. Just as earlier governments gave the vote to working-class men and later to women, so brave Prime Minister Miliband will give it to 16- and 17-year-olds. Please. There is a massive difference between those earlier historic extensions of the franchise and Miliband's plans: in the past, working men and women fought long and hard, marched tirelessly, protested riskily for the right to vote, for the right to determine the political make-up of their nation. There are no rabble-rousing 16-year-olds demanding the right to vote. Instead, it's being offered to them on a platter, whether they want it or not, because this extension of the franchise, which is an entirely top-down initiative, is designed to benefit the political class not the masses; its aim is not to expand democracy but to patch up and disguise the democratic malaise of the mainstream parties.

It is of course a complete mystery as to why teenagers are more likely to vote Labour. I thought youth was supposed to be anti-war, liberal, open-minded? Yet they would vote for a party that launched some of the most disastrous wars of the past 15 years and which rode roughshod over almost every civil liberty Brits have traditionally enjoyed? How peculiar. I guess this shows another problem with extending the vote to 16-year-olds – it infantilises the vote through extending it to those who are politically immature and morally simplistic, so much so that many of them really believe that voting for Labour is a radical thing to do. In short, Labour plans both to write off the adults who no longer engage with party politics and also to denigrate the vote itself, that most hard-won thing, through throwing it at teens. This might just be enough to make me go out and vote at the next election – against Labour.